Dick thought of the phrase often in the days to come, "to accept the war," and he felt a profound pity for the ardent idealists of the land that had been dragged from their dreams and their efforts and had been forced by merciless, insistent, continuing facts to admit that war was on the earth. Neither their denials nor their horror turned the Great Invader. He came on as if they were not. They had no weapons of eloquence, of reason, of beauty, that lessened his might, slowed his step. He was Power and Life and things as they are, and they were Denial and Fantasy and that which is not. But Ralph's effort to "accept the war" did not engross his mind nearly so much, Dick soon began to feel, as his effort to persuade Patsy to accept him--as a friend, of course! He was too humble now to think of more. Patsy's wrath at being classed with the uncivilized, as she insisted she had been, had not cooled, and Ralph, so long as he was engrossed with his hope of revival of progressive ideas, had not tried to cool it. He had determined that they could not safely meet, and, as he told Dick, he wasn't going to enliven everybody's parties any longer by quarreling with Patsy. "You certainly will take a good deal of ginger out of Sabinsport's festivities if you do stop seeing her, but you know you will hurt Patsy." "Hurt Patsy! I can't conceive a girl holding a man who was once her friend in greater contempt than she does me." "Nothing of the kind. Patsy suffers over these childish breaks more than you do. She really does, Ralph." "But I don't believe it. And no matter if she did feel it, it's no use. We've tried it out." And there he let it rest for many weeks, while he set himself at a stiff course of reading of war documents. He had resolved to read, he said, "without prejudice, and decide in cool blood if the case justified war!" Again and again, however, as he was attempting to follow the Prussian from his start, as Dick had advised, he found himself beginning with his own advent in Sabinsport six years before and his first meeting with Patsy McCullon soon after she had taken the position of "Assistant to the Principal" in the high school. He remembered exactly how she looked as she came briskly into Mary Sabins' handsome living-room--a straight, slender figure, brimming with life and curiosity--dark, clear eyes, dark waving hair, a nose with just a suggestion of a tilt, and a mouth all smiles and good humor. He remembered how full she was of her new work--to the practical exclusion of everybody else's interests, he recalled--how she had kept them laughing with tales of the terror of her first week; her suspicion that her pupils knew more than she did about algebra and geometry and Latin grammar. He had gone away without getting in more than a word on the _Argus_ and the iniquities of Sabinsport and a discomforted feeling that this young woman had made the most of her "social opportunities" to which High Town referred with such respect.